Posts Tagged ‘reputation’

Contemplating the extraordinary wealth of ideas and inspiration coming out of this year’s South by South West Interactive, it struck me that while they initially seemed disparate (visualizing music libraries, social media and revolution, the path to better crowdsourcing), many of the panels and ideas that excited me most had certain key themes in common.

Fundamentally, they all addressed the emerging challenge of our time-how to successfully navigate the age of abundance-an age where there is more information, more content and more connectivity that we could possibly have imagined even a decade ago.

The power of conversation

Unsurprisingly, Clay Shirky was first up to tackle this theme, with a characteristically barnstorming take on social media and revolution. His start point was that abundance is a profoundly powerful and disruptive political force-the power of abundance to disrupt is a recurring Shirky preoccupation. Abundant media, in this case, escapes the control of regimes. (And organizations. And more prosaically, brands). As he demonstrated, there is no history of a regime becoming more authoritative post internet access and a strong correlation between internet access and democratization.

Correlating internet access and democracy by Jacob Groshek

His over-arching point however was around the power of conversation and the idea that freedom of information is much less important than freedom of conversation. It is through conversation that individuals synchronise opinions and co-ordinate action. As Shirky more eloquently put it:

“We systematically overestimate the value of access to information & underestimate the value of access to each other.”

So, to extrapolate a little, conversation (or social context) is a powerful tool in helping us navigate a world of abundance.

Discovery through visualization

There are other tools of course too. Paul Lamereposed the fantastic question of how data visualization can enable discovery in a world of infinite abundance. Apparently 65% of the tracks users own are never listened to, suggesting we’re not able to adequately surface and discover the music we already own, never mind find more artists we might like. He showcased beautiful, hand-drawn visualizations from the jazz era and demo-ed extraordinary new approaches to surfacing and showcasing playlists, from artists’ connections to his own mind-blowing system based on acoustic similarity.

Music discovery through visualisation, from the jazz age to the present

Of course, most of us don’t have the coding skills to create breathtaking new interfaces. And these interfaces are unlikely (yet) to respond in real time to the vast quantities of new content generated every day. So conversation will remain, for many, a key method of discovery.

“The image compared sources of content (influence) from the Iran green movement in 2009 with the recent uprising in Eqypt.

In Iran there were four or five central nodes of influence: key people whose content was read, re-tweeted and then spread. But a look at the same chart regarding Eqypt shows a proliferation in nodes of influence, suggesting that today, there are many more individuals whose content is followed and that large communities are comprised not just of individuals but of sub-communities”

The visualisation below is a different pass at the same data, but you get the overall idea, particularly when compared to these Iran visualisations.

The dispersal of influence-"Egypt Influence Network" by Kovas Boguta

The Reputation Economy

This is where the question of reputation comes in. This was, for me, the dominant theme of the conference. I’ve been mulling the question of reputation over since I came across this Fast Company article on the rise of generosity. It really caught fire in my imagination though in conversation with the remarkable (and generous) John Winsor, CEO of Victor and Spoils. Read the rest of this entry »